Longtime CBS News correspondent Bob Simon killed in New York City car wreck

Veteran CBS News correspondent, Bob Simon, a longtime member of the 60 Minutes team of journalists, was killed in a New York City car accident on Wednesday night, CBS said. He was 73.

The network had no further immediate details on the award-winning journalist’s death.

The New York Daily News reported that Simon was a passenger in a taxi or car for hire that slammed into the back of another vehicle and struck a metal barrier on Manhattan’s West Side.

New York police said their officers responded to such an accident but declined to confirm the identity of the victim until next of kin were notified.

Simon’s career spanned five decades, from covering the Vietnam War to a piece on “60 Minutes” last weekend about the Oscar-nominated civil rights drama “Selma.”

Tall, lanky and possessed of an erudite demeanor on camera, Simon has covered most major overseas conflicts from the 1960s to the present and has been a regular contributor to the weekly “60 Minutes” news magazine on CBS since 1996.

The 2014-15 season was his 19th on the weekly Sunday night broadcast. He also was a correspondent on all seven seasons of “60 Minutes II” until that show ended its run in 2005.

He earned 27 Emmy awards for his reporting during his career, and won electronic journalism’s highest honor, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award, for the piece “Shame of Srebrencia,” a “60 Minutes II” report on genocide during the Bosnian War.